Blog Post

Email Marketing Mistakes You Want to Avoid

Statistics show that over 4.4 billion email accounts exist, and that, email interactions are one of the top digital activities among adults. If you are looking at kick-starting or fine-tuning your email marketing strategy, here are some mistakes that you want to avoid.

Relevance

Email marketing campaigns get tagged as spam when they are irrelevant. Email marketing is so much about driving engagement, and you cannot start a conversation with customers if they are not interested in what you are talking about. For instance, it does not make sense to talk to a customer who has bought a lawnmower on your e-commerce site, about smartwatches. They will probably wonder why they are getting random emails about smartwatches and are likely to mark your emails as spam, not open it the next time or unsubscribe from your email service. That is exactly why relevancy matters in email marketing. Businesses that send bulk email messages would do good by switching to a tailored email marketing strategy. A tailored email marketing strategy has greater chances of garnering views and clicks, as it is based on user points of interest and touch points on the site. You can send customers an email about items that they left in their shopping cart, to re-initiate missed sales opportunities. You can even try upselling in your ‘thank you for shopping with us’ emails, where you give them recommendations about other purchases that they might like.

Generic Emails

If you are looking to drive responses through your email conversations then you have to stop sending out generic emails to customers. Segmentation is indispensable for target email marketing. For instance, if you have customers who shop with your brand in brick-and-mortar stores while some others shop on online stores, a generic email will leave them confused. It does not help if you send online shoppers emails about sales that are happening in your brick-and-mortar stores and vice versa. Other factors that should be taken into account as a part of your email segmentation strategy is age, gender, and customer loyalty. Customers who fall under the student group are likely to look for sales and discounts while those who are working would be willing to splurge in the luxury section. Similarly, if you have customers who have shopped with you only once, bombarding them with emails will probably make them flee. On the other hand, customers who have been shopping with your brand for a while now will be more willing to responding to feedback emails.

Mail Frequency and Timing

Are you more likely to shop on a Monday morning? Probably not. How about a Sunday morning? The timing of your email marketing campaign can make a drastic difference to the results it yields. Of course, there is no thumb rule that you can follow on timing these emails, you want to test your email marketing at different times during the week, to see what works for your brand. Frequency is another crucial factor to take into account. If a customer has not shopped with you recently, do not bombard them with emails to come back and shop with you. What you can instead do is to send them an email offering a discount, and ask them if they want to change how often they receive these emails. You can even include an unsubscribe option at the button, letting customers know that you will give them their space, and not spam them.

For more information on creating an email marketing strategy, contact us today to speak with our marketing strategy team!